Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Last Tuesday, went to the Morgan Library to see the show of Peter Hujar's photographs: "Speed of Life." The creator of the iconic image of the Gay Liberation Front, showing 2 lines of young people walking down the street, arms linked, fists punching the air, Hujar was really a portraitist. The most compelling photos are headshots, followed by those of the body in half-recline. Since I was there, I also looked into the Tennessee Williams show, "No Refuge but in Writing." The final plays are really the results of lots of earlier stories, aborted versions, and messy revisions, suggested by Eliza Kazan and others, as much as by Williams's own muse. He exploited his life for his materials, as all writers do, and his life included other people's lives. * Wrote "Returning from the Women's March in DC" on Friday, tinkled with "Judy" on Saturday, and "Cyborg Vs The Grim Reaper" this morning. Cyborg sex: the wave of the futu...

Temple Art from here to the base of the statue is quite a long way             Diana Bridge, “Sequence, Sarnath” The scorpion, ink black,             looks out                         from his muscled back,             its eyes pierced and piercing, its tail                         poised to strike. How like the temple guardians             of China.                         With sure violence,  ...

Flute Music  How will I open the window, unless I’m crazy? How will I close it, unless I’m holy?      Adélia Prado, “Serenade” His flute bends the garden around the moon, enclosing the light of the new moon in roses. The roses dissolve and when they condense on their stalks they are redder than before. This goes on for a long time. His flute bends time and the moon obeys, falling and rising like water along the curve of its light, grazing the wide lip of the parapet, the intricate balcony, the eaves, and at the top of the note joining moon and music falls on the roses condensing into red. She listens at her window, unable to go or stay. Behind a rosebush I crouch, waxing and waning. * Besides Prado's poem, Debussy's Syrinx and Prélude á l’après-midi d’un faune were also in my head when I was writing this poem. As was Paul Morrison's Little Ashes , the 2008 film about the thwarted love between Federico García Lorca (Javier Beltrán) and Salva...

Wrote this yesterday. I think it needs another stanza in the middle. Prospectus My navel has sunk so deep that it touches the other side of my body. Flesh rushes in after the steep fall and leaves the opening a pulpy slit. You can stick in three fingers and not reach the tubes of the sea urchin. My skin is so highly polished that you can check your face on my bicep, fold it at right angle at the corner of my elbow, or stretch and contract over the wide curves of my ass. You can see the curious crowd behind you. No one is admitted on just his own merit. It is by chance or history that you got in.

Summer: Three Poems  The man starts stripping upon arrival in the room      and I feel something has gone wrong                Hayashi Amari Though he rises to his full height, I am taller by an inch.      He does not come back for a second kiss. On the train I look away after catching his eye.      He gets off without giving me another look. He is putting away his laundry when I arrive.      Let’s get on with it , closing his drawers.

Mark Burnhope suggested I write a poem taking off from the title, after he visited this blog and read the warning page. Thanks, Mark! I Understand and I Wish to Continue Before he comes home, tired and faintly greasy from office disappointments and crowded train, I flick open my laptop to get off the head of steam accumulated from an hour of workout at the gym. The two men, one darkhaired and toned, a regular, the other faircolored and fresh from his “first time,” the website-speak for a solo jerkoff shoot, greet each other’s body with no surprise but with speed suggesting desire. They know the routine, as do I, first one, then the other, sucking the other’s dick, the tongue, through circles that it draws, darting, the thrilling amble like an elephant’s into the ring. The shouts mount in well-timed urgency, released like flying handle bars and caught again on return. The head falls backwards before the camera locks on his dick when he can...

Laugh all you want— he is taking the scaffolding down, this young man in a yellow hard hat xxxxx he is taking the scaffolding down xxxxx with the other deliberate fellows xxxxxxxxxx he is unscrewing the steel brackets xxxxxxxxxx he is dismantling all the right angles xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx he is switching eyes with me— xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx the kind fellow—as I hammer past xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx he is taking the scaffolding down, xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx unlocking the entrance to the bank.

Sex with Big Hands Desire, sight, Eyes, lips, seeke, see, prove, and find      Lady Mary Wroth, “Pamphilia to Amphilanthus” I want to hold up a boy’s big hands and kiss him on his lips, gently first, feeling the slight shock of contact pass into a warming, then fitting like a screw-top on a jar of jam, when lips become mouths, mobile, deep, and moist, tongues touching. You know that moment when a body that is holding itself in, looking out, curious, cautious, from behind a gauzy curtain, relents and follows itself out to greet your eager hips gladly, that moment’s a proof, finding.

Another Look at Pornography There’s nothing more debauched than thinking. —Wisława Szymborska, “An Opinion on the Question of Pornography” Reading the Polish Nobel Laureate’s opinion on the question of pornography, a question that much obsesses me, I was disappointed by its sidestep into the airy realm of thought, as if viewing smut has no traffic with thinking. Wandering round a Chelsea flea market today, I chanced upon a box of yellowed porno mags. In one called Don , dated 1974, fully pictured with twenty-something boys doing the nasty, was a report on “Homosexualität in Singapur.” Not knowing German, I could only make out two names, New Nation and old Bugis Street. What would the Nobel Laureate make of that happy coincidence of knowledge, home and sex? Or my refusal to pay $20 for that piece of luck?

Almost Nothing In It The Great Mother’s visage is her bulging belly with its blind navel in the middle. —Wisława Szymborska, “A Palaeolithic Fertility Fetish,” translated by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh After we are gone for a very long time, our archeologists will discover a tube of lubricant in the ashes of the fireplace while digging for the silver music discs we played. The tube, the length of a hand, makes no sound even when it is shaken vigorously. It goes thud , thud when it slaps the fired bricks. It hardly squeaks when it is rubbed. It must be inserted into a slightly bigger cylindrical slot in a machine like the juice maker unearthed yesterday. Its top comes off, the plastic screw threads worn down like teeth. It smells like adhesives. There is almost nothing in it, but the boys at the lab will make sure. Then it will be cleaned and classified and labeled in a traveling show that will attract a heated ephebe to compose a poem. He will, o...

No point looking to this film for narrative or character, because you won't find either. Directed by French provocateur Catherine Breillat, "Anatomy of Hell" is about the power of images to elicit strong emotions like loathing and aggression. A woman pays a gay man to "watch her where she is unwatchable." Inside her house, which quickly becomes a metaphor for the female body, the woman (Amira Casar) strips naked and lies down in bed like a Renaissance nude but in a room lit like an operating theater. The man (porn star Rocco Siffredi) began as a voluble and complacent observer but very quickly became a silent and helpless participant in the woman's search for her sexual identity. He hates the weakness of female flesh, because it reminds him of his own mortality, and so he punishes it by sticking his dick into her anus and, on another night, by sticking the handle of a rake into her vagina. He is both fascinated and repelled by vagina fluid, rolling it on h...

The body of an ageing woman Is a memory —Eavan Boland, “Anna Liffey” The first fluency has left me. Sex has acquired history. I grow afraid of repeating myself unknowingly. Love, new man, old enemy, you enclose me with your mouth. Go slowly.

Edited by Rose Kelleher, Issue 12 of the Shit Creek Review is kinky in the best way. It makes us think about the relationship between poetry and perversion. One might say poetry is a perversion of everyday language. Saying so not only sexualizes poetry, but also politicizes it. For who gets to say what is normal and what is perversion? Under whose regime are we still living, no matter how hard we try to liberate ourselves? What does it mean for me to publish my poems about a father's belting, anal sex, underaged sex,  SM and fisting under the rubric of "perversions"? The line in the sand is always shifting: is anal sex still considered perverted or is it on its way to normalization? Normalized under what regime? There must always be lines, as there must always be regimes of control. The Latin root of "pervert" means "to overturn" or "to subvert." The meanings overlap but they are not the same. Subversion is the diligent, secret work of s...

I was expecting theatrical magic from The Lion King , when I watched it with my family on July 4. The show was engaging, but proved to be less than enchanting. When I watched the parade of puppet-animals on YouTube, accompanied by the song "The Circle of Life," I cried. At the Minskoff Theatre, the song sounded tinny, and the puppets by Julie Taymor, beautiful individually, were too few to really impress. Only one elephant? One rhinoceros? Everything seemed smaller than the YouTube video had led me to imagine. The less heralded stage design, by Richard Hudson, was for me much more impressive. Pride Rock rose in a majestic spiral from the stage floor. In contrast, Scar's cave was a slanted bed of rock limited by a triangular ceiling. The staging of the wildebeest stampede, during which Mufasa fell to his death, was wonderfully imaginative. The singing, by the ensemble as well as by Dashaun Young (Simba) and Chauntee Schuler (Nala), did not do justice to the Elton John ...

I did not say in yesterday's post that another attractive aspect of Heaney's essay is its tender and non-ironic feel for sex. About his poem "Undine": It was the dark pool of the sound of the word that first took me: if our auditory imaginations were sufficiently attuned to plumb and sound a vowel, to unite the most primitive and civilized associations, the word "undine" would probably suffice as a poem in itself. Unda, a wave; undine, a water-woman-- a litany of undines would have ebb and flow, water and woman, wave and tide, fulfillment and exhaustion in its very rhythms. But old two-faced vocable that it is, I discovered a more precise definition once, by accident, in a dictionary. An undine is a water sprite who has to a marry a human being and have a child by him before she can become human. With that definition, the lump in the throat, or rather the thump in the ear, undine, became a thought, a field of force that called up other images. One of these...

Found Poem Two birds shat on my window. Two thumbprints, ridges and whorls. Dribbling a tail, they look like spermatozoa swimming up the sky. My landlord, who is also a cop, will be after me to clean the glass. *

I thought I was done with my pillow book, but it is not done with me. I could replace the weakest link. Which one is it? The cartoons I loved xxx The cartoons I loved to trace were Conan the Barbarian, wrists lashed with ropes to his ankles, and Flash Gordon, heaving under chains. Superhuman strength against unbreakable restraint. xxx Matt tied to his bed, that was the first time I was hard enough to penetrate. xxx To make Wolverine, the adamantine has to go in. *

Here's the final poem of my pillow book, to make up the mystical number of thirty-three: 33. I mark my place in books xxx I mark my place in books with bits of trash. A bus ticket in Great Expectations . A grocery receipt in Beyond Good and Evil . In The Ambassadors an old postcard from Singapore. It occurs to me this morning while shelving my books that I mark my place in men with bits of my body. My dick in Todd. Big toe in Doug. Eric, whom I thought I was done with, has my left elbow. The beautiful boy last night who did not give his name has all of my fingers holding him open. *

27. Japanese Things xxx Tamagotchi. The highest standard of living in Asia. xxx A third language offered in secondary school, besides French and German. xxx Comics illustrating love between men, created by women for women. xxx Hugging pillow, also called a Dutch wife. xxx His cock still inside me, the man answered a call from his mother in Tokyo. xxx Suicidal sects. Asymmetry. xxx After the Japanese occupied Singapore, they purged the island. Among the men shot at Changi Beach were donors to the China Relief Fund, men with tattoos, and Hainanese. The death toll is claimed by some to be 100 000. The Japanese claims 5 000. The truth is buried in between. xxx The Red and White Song Competition. Akina Nakamori. *

20. First Things xxx The first time I entered a storytelling competition, I told the story of the greedy dog. Snapping the bone in the water, he lost the bone in the mouth. xxx The first time I fell in school, I muddied my white shorts. Terrified of looking as if I had fouled myself, I tried to clean my arse on the white walls. The stain not only stayed but spread. xxx I was thirteen the first time I published a poem. It was about looking at the rain lash the bronze back of the land. xxx The first time I fell in love, I was talking to God. After Darren prayed for me in Lee Abbey, I could hardly stay away from him. At the Lord's supper, I could hardly wait for the body of Christ to give each other the sign of the peace, when I could hold him briefly. I was twenty-one. xxx I had to bring a date for the Civil Service Dinner and so I brought a girl out for the first time. xxx The first time I saw New York was like the first time I saw Oxford, although one was more like a movie a...